Crossword clues for fumarole
fumarole
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Fumarole \Fu"ma*role\, n. [It. fumaruola, fr. fumo smoke, L. fumus: cf. F. fumerolle, fumarolle.] A hole or spot in a volcanic or other region, from which fumes issue.
Wiktionary
n. An opening in the ground that emits steam and gases due to volcanic activity.
Wikipedia
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A fumarole (or fumerole - the word ultimately comes from the Latin fumus, "smoke") is an opening in a planet's crust, often in areas surrounding volcanoes, which emits steam and gases such as carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen chloride, and hydrogen sulfide. The steam forms when superheated water vaporizes as its pressure drops when it emerges from the ground. The name solfatara, from the Italian solfo, "sulfur" (via the Sicilian language - compare to the volcano Solfatara), is given to fumaroles that emit sulfurous gases.
Fumaroles may occur along tiny cracks or long fissures, in chaotic clusters or fields, and on the surfaces of lava flows and of thick deposits of pyroclastic flows. A fumarole field is an area of thermal springs and gas vents where magma or hot igneous rocks at shallow depth release gases or interact with groundwater. From the perspective of groundwater, a fumarole could be described as a hot spring that boils off all its water before the water reaches the surface.
Fumaroles may persist for decades or centuries if located above a persistent heat source; or they may disappear within weeks to months if they occur atop a fresh volcanic deposit that quickly cools. The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, for example, was formed during the 1912 eruption of Novarupta in Alaska. Initially, thousands of fumaroles occurred in the cooling ash from the eruption, but over time most of them have become extinct.
An estimated four thousand fumaroles exist within the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park in the United States. In April 2006 fumarole emissions killed three ski-patrol workers east of Chair 3 at Mammoth Mountain Ski Area in California. The workers were overpowered by toxic fumes (a mazuku) that had accumulated in a crevasse they had fallen into. Another example is an array of fumaroles in the Valley of Desolation in Morne Trois Pitons National Park in Dominica.
Fumaroles emitting sulfurous vapors form surface deposits of sulfur-rich minerals; places in which these deposits have been mined include:
- Kawah Ijen and Arjuno-Welirang, Indonesia
- Purico Complex near San Pedro de Atacama in Chile
- Xingyang in Sichuan province, China
- Mt Tongariro in the central North Island, New Zealand
- White Island in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand (mined from the 1880s to the 1930s)
Usage examples of "fumarole".
Daeman crawled closer, fingers and feet scrabbling on skulls, and looked at the tall heap of eggs from as close as he could get without lifting his head above the level of the fumarole crater rim.
He waited until the steam and vapors were thick as a smoke screen and slid down the side of the fumarole, dropping the last five feet.
Only the edge of the storm had touched the fumarole field before it had swerved, leaving them unscathed.
I asked as I watched a fumarole just upwind of where we trembled in a near-hover.
We went as quick as we might along the rolling road, among live forests and dead ones, smelling the stinks of distant fumaroles as though they had been the stinks of a body decaying, waking sadly in the mornings and walking the day through no happier, urgently going, driven by our own need to do whatever it was needed doing without any real hope that it would do any good at all.
Haynes had postulated that the dune seas of this world had tides and movements, exhalations and fumaroles that hinted at mysteries far beneath the surface.
When Jesse finished, the planetary ecologist stared at the chamber wall, his gaze distant, as if his imagination was roaming across the dunes to rich spice fields and worm sands, to gasping fumaroles and hidden tunnels beneath the desert, running like blue veins through a living planet.
I never suspected that sand whirlpools and fumaroles might be crucial links in the chain of spice distribution.
Two weeks later plumes of steam were seen issuing from fumaroles high atop Pelee.
Steam roiling up from the lake, the mud pots, the fumaroles, glowed in opalescent plumes.
All around the base of the city, and into its ugly flanks, and among its heaped debris, were fumaroles from which came plumes of smoke and red glarings that pulsed and shook.
Jets of burning gases, the flames weirdly hued in greens and purples, shot from scattered fumaroles and rents in the ground.
He suggests that, in the cases of blindness or amnesia, the victims presumably fall into one of the fumaroles by mistake.
Tiger said that this was just the time to see the famous geysers and fumaroles of the little spa.
The stink of sulphur was disgusting, and each bubbling, burping nest of volcanic fumaroles was more horrific than the last.